As an Anfield season ticket holder, Liverpool and modern football feel so tone-deaf right now.
The real issue is not simply that football is getting more expensive, but through pricing, access and hospitality, the game is selecting for a different crowd, and in doing so, changing the very feeling of it all.
This is not just revenue strategy, it is cultural engineering. And once you start changing who gets in, you inevitably start changing what football feels like.
Through a true fan’s lens, that is the danger.
Because football was never built on polished messaging, premium positioning or neatly managed audiences. It was built on feeling.
On ritual, on sacrifice, on working-class people structuring their weeks, their moods and in many cases, their lives around their club.
The atmosphere, the edge, the unpredictability, the emotional charge of it all, that is not something added on top.
It is the very essence, it is the beating heart of the entire thing, and this is why it means so much to me personally.
1960s Kop Crowd (PA Images)
My ticket was once my grandad’s and my great-grandad’s before it became mine. That means everything to me. It is family legacy.
The worrying part is that it increasingly feels like it means far less to the club than it does to those of us who carry that history.
My ticket is family inheritance to me. The club treats it like inventory and that is the disconnect. What the club sees as pricing, many of us experience as something far more sacred.
Not just a Liverpool problem
LONDON, ENGLAND - Thursday, January 8, 2026: Liverpool travelling supporters in full voice during the FA Premier League match between Arsenal FC and Liverpool FC at the Emirates Stadium. (Photo by David Rawcliffe/Propaganda)
That is where it has gone wrong and what we are seeing at Liverpool is not happening in isolation.
It is part of a wider drift in global football where clubs, leagues and governing bodies like FIFA are becoming increasingly comfortable managing the business while slowly losing touch with the human reality of what they are handling.
Supporters understand costs rise. They understand football is expensive. They understand clubs have to think commercially.
What they do not accept so easily is being spoken to as though the only thing that matters is the logic of the decision, rather than the meaning of it.
That is where the game feels tone-deaf now. It appears that far too many people running football understand price, but do not understand feeling. Or worse, they understand it well enough to market it, but not well enough to protect it.
That is the contradiction.
Football does not live in the bigger picture
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND - Saturday, December 13, 2025: Liverpool's supporters banner "CHAMPIARNE" in support of the head coach Arne Slot before the FA Premier League match between Liverpool FC and Brighton & Hove Albion FC at Anfield. (Photo by David Rawcliffe/Propaganda)
The very supporters who create the atmosphere, identity and emotional weight of clubs like Liverpool are the same supporters increasingly being asked to absorb more, accept more, and tolerate more.
All while being told it is all reasonable in the bigger picture.
But football does not live in the bigger picture, it lives in the turnstiles, the stands, the songs, the flags, the away days, the family traditions and the emotional inheritance passed from one generation to the next.
That is what people are reacting to, not just a number. Not just another rise. It is the clearest sign yet that too much of football has become more comfortable monetising supporter culture than protecting it.
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND - Wednesday, March 18, 2026: Liverpool supporters celebrate with Hugo Ekitike after the second goal during the UEFA Champions League Round of 16 2nd Leg match between Liverpool FC and Galatasaray A.?. at Anfield. (Photo by UEFA)
And we are no longer drifting towards that reality, we are in it.
You can feel it week in, week out in the atmosphere, in the tone, in the massive distance between clubs and the people on the stands who truly built them.
And once that feeling is lost, no commercial strategy can bring it back. That is why this matters.
Football is at its best when it still feels alive
FRANKFURT, GERMANY - Wednesday, October 22, 2025: Liverpool supporters during the UEFA Champions League match between Eintracht Frankfurt and Liverpool FC at the Waldstadion. Liverpool won 5-1. (Photo by David Rawcliffe/Propaganda)
From a true fan’s perspective, football is not at its best when it is cleanest, sanitised, or most optimised.
It is at its best when it still feels alive, when it still feels like it belongs to the people who carry it.
That is the bit the modern game has to be very careful not to lose entirely, and right now, far too often, it feels like the people in charge are getting that part badly wrong.